I think thats the most important thing that stars should take away from all of this. Both proposals are simply ludicrous and only serve to make 4-5/however many top-pros on the site win ALL of the money. I don't see how this is any more fair than the alternative of leaving it be. If anything, since the only benefit is given to the top few players online, it is by definition, very unfair.

Both the weak regs and strong regs are going to be shouting "me! me! me!" in this thread, so the only thing that should inspire change is if somehow this will make the games better for fish or generate more rake for stars (equally selfish but understandable). And it won't... so don't change it.

And I know its somewhat taboo to say this in a thread like this, but these are peoples careers and lives we are talking about... Is the lobby "looking" clean (while providing no tangible benefit to anyone who matters) worth taking away dozens of peoples livelihoods? I think all things being equal we should keep our jobs instead of just making the top 5 people exceptionally rich (again this is only fish, reg on reg action like you want it simply will not happen). Stars created this system in the first place, and like it or not many people have dedicated their lives to it. Changing it is wrong, period, and more people should be speaking up about that aspect ITT.

Double Blind Challenges
As either of these changes will make setting up a Heads Up match against a specific opponent more difficult, we are also looking to implement a double blind heads up match feature.

Please please please make this available for games and stakes that do not currently have hu tables. Currently if you're playing a table with someone where you both want hu, you're subject to asking for hu every couple minutes when a 3rd person sits, and it only takes 1 douchebag to prevent you from playing the game you both want to play.

1) In regards to people cheating the system and harassment from groups of players............... couldn't stars still police the tables and issues warnings to players involved in this. It would only take a few strong warnings to put a quick end to this.

No.

Whether rules were enforced manually or via software, the exact behavior that makes up abuse would need to be defined in any case.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SallyWoo

[2) Although Stars and FT operate independently, can I safely assume that FT will be following this same business plan?
SallyWoo

Really good discussion in here so far. Kanu and TC have made some really good points. I agree with their general sentiment that both proposals punish the weak regulars too much.

Both proposed options will result in a HU world where the strong regulars get access to all the recreational players. I understand many people think this is OK; I disagree, but that argument has been played out in other threads. I just want to point this out for being a very likely outcome from both proposals.

Under option #1, the strong regulars can simply continuously sit with anyone else sitting at HU tables, essentially forcing any weaker opposition to either always play (and likely lose) or not play HU at all.

Under option #2, the strongest regulars will quickly take their place in the pecking order and occupy all the visible HU tables. I believe it's extremely unlikely for there to be long-term "reg and reg" battles for these tables; just look at other sites with KoTH systems and it's clear this system again just gives strong regulars access to all the recreational players.

If the goals of the changes are to cleanup the lobby and give a reward to players willing to play anyone, perhaps a modified version of #2 could be the best. How about option #2 where 50% of the default visible tables are static and 50% randomly change from the entire pool of HU tables. This way, strong regulars get rewarded for their willingness to play anyone, but weak regulars still have a decent chance of getting to play recreational players or other weak regulars.

I prefer solution #1 by far
There are so many bumhunters out there, its not even funny.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PokerStars Nick

The number of hands of forced play is up for debate. Something between 10 and 20 seems likely.

The penalty would be capped at the amount of blinds you would pay for the remainder of the forced hand period. However, the initial/maximum penalty is also up for debate.

If you make the forced hands between 10-20 please make sure that if someone sits out after the forced amount of hands he has to leave the table. Now the bumhunter has to open another table and can be resit again. That would be great. More action less bumhunters.

Weaker regs have to move down, but its always the case that only the best survive. Take a look at the Hypers HU Lobbys, where the Sharkystrator tool is implied. So many weak regs are at stakes where they usually would not survive.

2) Although Stars and FT operate independently, can I safely assume that FT will be following this same business plan?

SallyWoo

Yea the situation is worse on FT.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kanu

4) Make sure that the solution is not unreasonable for lower stakes players. At lower stakes the rake is simply too high to sustain a lot of reg on reg action. For 1 reg to be beating the rake, the other reg has to be losing at such a high rate that he won't be playing for long. A possible solution to that would be to have a similar system but with the option to play multi-table matches with significantly lower rake. For example if you add a second table then you only play 80% of the normal rake at each of the 2 tables, 70% if you play 3, 60% if you play 4 etc. This encourages people to play more tables = good for stars and gives the regs a fighting chance of beating the rake and moving up in stakes. Another option is to just have a similar system to option 2 but much less harsh. A limited number of tables but much closer to the number of people that want to sit than at high stakes. That way you will probably have to have some reg battles to establish yourself as someone who can sit but you will still be able to keep a decent ratio of hands coming against weaker players meaning that you are able to beat the rake. Anything that causes low stakes players to play other regs for the vast majority of their hands will probably make the games unbeatable and cut out HU play as an option for someone looking to move up. That can't be good long-term for anyone.

In an ideal world this would be a great idea for the games I play, but the fact is stars probably wont accommodate anything that requires the adjustment of rake. I'm not very computer savvy but I imagine to implement software that changes rake for different/added tables would be pretty tough to do, perhaps extra FPP's would be easier, similar to the happy hour.

I also think you're giving the average person who sits at low stakes HU tables slightly too much credit, ~80% of the players who sit wouldn't play a match even if there was 0 rake involved, I think most guys who actually play will welcome a KOTH at low stakes, even if its tough at first, just to weed out all the scumbags. Its unfair to the "weak regulars" who battle, but that is a tiny % of the player pool at these stakes.

In an ideal world this would be a great idea for the games I play, but the fact is stars probably wont accommodate anything that requires the adjustment of rake. I'm not very computer savvy but I imagine to implement software that changes rake for different/added tables would be pretty tough to do, perhaps extra FPP's would be easier, similar to the happy hour.

I also think you're giving the average person who sits at low stakes HU tables slightly too much credit, ~80% of the players who sit wouldn't play a match even if there was 0 rake involved, I think most guys who actually play will welcome a KOTH at low stakes, even if its tough at first, just to weed out all the scumbags. Its unfair to the "weak regulars" who battle, but that is a tiny % of the player pool at these stakes.

Sounds like you have more knowledge of these games than me. Surely if some form of KOTH is implemented then you at least need quite a high number of people able to sit though? I would have thought that even the best reg at low stakes can't beat the next few in line because of the rake? It sounds like some variation of Option 1 works quite well for lower stakes then so that lottery players will get weeded out by regs who actually want to play but in general, regs will be able to sit unmolested a fairly large % of the time assuming that they are good enough to play that limit while people will still be able to get reg action most of the time if desired as well?

I agree wholeheartedly with Kanu's point that if there is an angle, someone is going to exploit it. I also agree strongly with d2themfi's point that we need an automated system which gets the incentives right, rather than one which relies on Stars to police the games.

I think in addition to these two criteria we want the system to be very simple, so everyone can understand it with zero effort.

Finally, I want to map the incentive structure at play here. The driver of the system is action with rec players; because this action is so valuable, regulars are willing to play many hands against each other for every hand they get to play hu with a rec player.

But they don't currently have to do that, they can just sit there. So let's make them play. How?

I favor a KoTH system with a capped number of tables. It's simple, it gets the incentives right, and it lets the rec guys leave at any time (let me tell you, if I take a massive beat for my stack, I don't want to play another 19 hands vs some *******!), and it gives the recs the choice to play a few different people (if that ******* put a huge beat on me last time and needled me, I don't want to be forced to play him again!). It also keeps the lobby pretty clean, and provides some liquidity at lower stakes so that recs always have access to empty tables. I think something like Toocurious's suggestion is solid:

Though I'd favor fewer tables per limit, 60 seems cluttered to me, and even 8 25/50 seems like a bit much.

The only other thing I'd add is some kind of 'play hu' request, so that weaker regs, or any two players holding a grudge, have an easy way to play each other (maybe there both 6max regs who couldn't get a seat in the hu lobby). There's minimal downside to this.

Also, (and flame away guys ) I'm baffled by the fact that weak regs' incentives even get talked about. Some number of regs is desirable for recs to have game selection and liquidity, on top of that they're superfluous. If you're a weak reg, just move down until you're a strong reg. That's how it works at 6max, and I don't see how the hu lobby necessitates anything different beyond the fact that weak regs sitting huge stakes is the status quo. It's like saying we're neglecting $1/$2 6max regs' rights by not giving them enough soft $2/$4 games to play- it makes no sense!

i) You can sit out v. someone given that you've played them, say 100 hands in the past week. This will get rid of the absolute bumhunters*, keep options for the recreational players, and ensure that the mediocre regs have to 'pay' the good for the right to sit out v. them. This also eliminates the problem scenario you talk of.

ii) Only apply the blinds 'fine' for the regs. The recreational players would not like this rule and it was not designed for them. You can easily come up with a good measure of reg (e.g 5,000 HU hands played in the past year, perhaps with some winrate requirement).**

iii) There's nothing to say you can't implement one strategy on Stars, one on Full Tilt, and see which works better (yes, I know you are to some degree separate companies, but still...)

*100 hands is plenty enough to get rid of the bumhunters. Assume someone is bad but refuses to play anyone who isn't awful (there are plenty of these people). They would have to play about 1500 hands per week v. 'regs' which imo is easily enough to dissuade them from sitting HU at all. What's more, you could easily change the 100 hand figure to find the balance that you are looking for.

**The bumhunters might take advantage of the 5,000 hand limit to use new accounts. But it's low enough that they'd need one pretty regularly, so I don't think it's a big problem.

^^Good, but too complicated. Also, violates the 'same rules for everybody' principle, which isn't a good precedent.

Good point. Just remove my second suggestion. Make the first suggestion

i) You can sit out if you've played someone x (~100) hands in the past week.
ii) You have to play a minimum of 10 hands before getting 'fined'.

ii) allows people to leave if they have something to do (sometimes you've forgotten you're still sitting at a table and genuinely don't want to play, or something comes up). It will allow recreational players to hit and run as long as they don't play 2 hands. You could completely remove ii) but bumhunters would exploit it by playing 2 hands at a time and making it a pain for the regs to get their 100 hands a week in.

I really think just forcing someone to give a minimum of 100 hands a week action to anyone who wants it would dramatically reduce the lobby clutter and reward those who are willing to give action, which is the motivation behind Pokerstars decision.

I think a KoTH system needs to include some sort of sit-out time bank which gradually increases as you play more hands at the table.

It should start off very small like 1 minute or less so that weaker regs can't table block stronger regs but should pretty quickly build as hands are played so that a recreational player who needs a bathroom break doesn't immediately get picked up (which would likely result in some weaker regs attempting to block that table so he cannot return).

Thanks for taking the time to try to sort this issue out and to get feedback from players before doing so. I agree with the people who posted saying that by far the best and simplest solution is to just only allow a certain number of tables with 1 player sitting with 1 table per person per limit. This is kind of what you are trying to do with option 2 but it looks like that needs to be cleaned up a lot before implementing. If there is 1 thing that is clear from the last few years of online poker it is that if you leave room for people to exploit the system, they will absolutely do it. If you implemented option 2 in its current form then you would either have to police it or you would just have people angle shooting all over the place. Your problem scenario would go on all the time and it would probably end up being pretty unpleasant for everyone who isn't prepared to sit there all day dealing with angle shooters.

I also think that both of the options are too harsh on the weak regulars. If these players are prepared to play against other regulars a lot of the time then it seems pretty unfair for the better players to then get all the recreational player action despite the fact that the weak regulars are actually the ones "giving action" in the hope of getting a table. The strong regulars are getting the weak regular action plus the recreational player action if the system means that weak regulars can never sit at a visible table or never sit without having strong regulars constantly sitting with them. Option 2 could perhaps be modified to include a system whereby if you are playing a multi-table match then you get an automatic visible table as well where you can decline action but keep the table? That is probably open to some exploiting as well but I'm not sure what the best solution is for Option 2 here.

For option 1 I think that you would need to have a number of hands/day vs someone (or something similar) after which you can decline their action and keep a table for the rest of the day. That would stop harassment issues. It seems like the best reg has too much power in this option atm. He can basically pick on anybody he likes and force them to get off the tables. If this person were prepared to play almost any other player but had already lost a load to the best player and wanted to refuse action then this would seem pretty unfair. Essentially if the best reg is reasonable then it works well, if not then most people (or whoever he picks on) will not enjoy the system at all.

A few other things to consider when designing a good system though are:

1) Make sure the incentives are right. In option 1 atm the best reg is incentivised to sit with people all day long and everyone else will therefore be incentivised to not sit which leads to less action between other regs with the best reg dominating the lobby and getting all fish action. This is fixed by limiting the power to do that for the best reg by the number of hands per day fix or a length of time that you can't sit with someone who quit you like 1 hour or something. In option 2 atm people are incentivised to exploit the system in order to take the visible tables for themselves. This would def happen so something needs to be in place to stop it. 1 possible solution is to ban players cheating the system. Another possible solution is to introduce an amount of time which people can't have a visible table for after quitting someone. So if Player A wants to abuse the system by sitting with Player B with the intention of only playing a few hands but then taking the new visible table, when they quit after a few hands, they will no longer be able to have a visible table for 30 mins/1 hour.

2) Cater to the weak regulars a little more. People playing better regs to improve/get tables is good for the health of the games and should be encouraged. Under the current proposals it seems they would get very little return on any investment of attempting to be able to sit at tables and wait for good action.

3) Make sure that any forced playing is not too intrusive. Imagine I want to play HU so I sit at a table at 3 different limits but then start-up some 6max games while I wait for action. I max out how many 6max tables I am comfortable with and then someone decides to sit on all of my HU tables at the same time. I now have far too many tables to play at once with a mix of HU and 6max. There would need to be a long enough time delay between him sitting and forced play starting for me to be able to check the sitout next bb box at my 6max tables and have the blind come round to me. Also there is a potential exploit here in that someone could angleshoot me by seeing that I am playing 6max, sit at all my tables, get me to quit my 6max games and then he can sitout and leave after the minimum hands on each table. Now the next time he does this, what am I supposed to do? I want to play him HU but I don't want to quit my 6max games just to play the minimum number of hands. He could essentially angleshoot the tables away from me despite having no intention to play for a reasonable length of time. Either that or I have to not play 6max while waiting for HU action to avoid having people angleshoot me.

4) Make sure that the solution is not unreasonable for lower stakes players. At lower stakes the rake is simply too high to sustain a lot of reg on reg action. For 1 reg to be beating the rake, the other reg has to be losing at such a high rate that he won't be playing for long. A possible solution to that would be to have a similar system but with the option to play multi-table matches with significantly lower rake. For example if you add a second table then you only play 80% of the normal rake at each of the 2 tables, 70% if you play 3, 60% if you play 4 etc. This encourages people to play more tables = good for stars and gives the regs a fighting chance of beating the rake and moving up in stakes. Another option is to just have a similar system to option 2 but much less harsh. A limited number of tables but much closer to the number of people that want to sit than at high stakes. That way you will probably have to have some reg battles to establish yourself as someone who can sit but you will still be able to keep a decent ratio of hands coming against weaker players meaning that you are able to beat the rake. Anything that causes low stakes players to play other regs for the vast majority of their hands will probably make the games unbeatable and cut out HU play as an option for someone looking to move up. That can't be good long-term for anyone.

5) Finally, thanks to stars again for committing to resolve the issue and I hope you come up with something good. My personal opinion is that the best solution is 1 that doesn't discriminate between how good players are but how willing they are to play people. If the best and the 10th best players at a limit are both prepared to play anyone then they should have an equal chance of playing against recreational players. This keeps the games healthier long-term as the money is spread about between a number of HU regs who are prepared to battle regs and these people will therefore battle regs longer term. Any solution which gives all the fish money to the best 1 or 2 players means that HU games below that standard get largely cut out and HU just becomes a way for the best couple of players at each limit to take the money from any fish that wants to play HU. While there will probably be some battling initially for the top couple of spots and then occasionally when someone wants to move up (more action than now still I would guess), for the most part I would imagine that this wouldn't be the best way to encourage action. Basically you want anyone who is prepared to battle regs for the ability to sit to be able to do so and to be able to sit as a result of their battling. Option 1 achieves this pretty well with some modifications and option 2 achieves this if you get the number of visible tables right and stop angleshooting.

or something. stars could better figure out the right number of each. and it'd be easy to adjust in the future if they were slightly off from ideal.

but then to be fair, stars would need to create lower stakes HU tables with lower rake, right? Where all .25/.50 players will go if they are not good enough to play those stakes? Everybody should be able to start from the bottom in HU, similarly to 6/9max.

Both the weak regs and strong regs are going to be shouting "me! me! me!" in this thread, so the only thing that should inspire change is if somehow this will make the games better for fish or generate more rake for stars (equally selfish but understandable). And it won't... so don't change it.

Oh, you only care about the recreational player's well being?

Quote:

Originally Posted by MurderbyNumbers234

And I know its somewhat taboo to say this in a thread like this, but these are peoples careers and lives we are talking about... Is the lobby "looking" clean (while providing no tangible benefit to anyone who matters) worth taking away dozens of peoples livelihoods?

Oh, apparently not.

Everyone who plays on Stars is a customer of Stars, not an employee. It's nice of them to be concerned with what we think though, and I think that is part of Stars selling the lifestyle and career of reaching the top and being a professional poker player. I continue to be impressed with them on a monthly basis.

I think the table cap per limit is the best option as well, but given that many of us had pushed for that in previous threads, and PS didn't include it as an option, I assumed it wasn't something they were considering. If it were to happen, there should be a difference in the cap between NLHE and PLO given the size of the player pools. I would suggest PLO to look something like this:

I also think people are underestimating how many issues there would be with option #1. There would be a lot of room for angling, and the top player would have so much power they could effectively prevent anyone they wanted from playing.

I think the table cap per limit is the best option as well, but given that many of us had pushed for that in previous threads, and PS didn't include it as an option, I assumed it wasn't something they were considering. If it were to happen, there should be a difference in the cap between NLHE and PLO given the size of the player pools. I would suggest PLO to look something like this:

I also think people are underestimating how many issues there would be with option #1. There would be a lot of room for angling, and the top player would have so much power they could effectively prevent anyone they wanted from playing.

Like i mean if stars go the cap tables way for the lobby, Don't cap the tables drastically at the start, Juts got slowly cutting the numbers down and trial it to you find the perfect number per stake which is going to be the best (Work the best).

Anything will be better than the 30-40+ tables per stake at the moment obv.

Also, (and flame away guys ) I'm baffled by the fact that weak regs' incentives even get talked about. Some number of regs is desirable for recs to have game selection and liquidity, on top of that they're superfluous. If you're a weak reg, just move down until you're a strong reg. That's how it works at 6max, and I don't see how the hu lobby necessitates anything different beyond the fact that weak regs sitting huge stakes is the status quo. It's like saying we're neglecting $1/$2 6max regs' rights by not giving them enough soft $2/$4 games to play- it makes no sense!

What are you talking about, Its whoever has the fastest seating script in the 6max games. The Bumhunting is just as bad in 6max games and seating scripts scummy behaviour etc

Another thing please just get rid of wait lists as your trying to improve the look of the lobby's and it really doesn't look good to see these moron scriptors wait list every game running plus its just going to get worse and make the lobby look horrendous if you cap the tables